


Even the Losers Get Lucky Sometimes

by Unchained_Daisychain



Series: Chains of Love [1]
Category: The Beatles
Genre: A stupid bet, Alcohol, Bad Decisions, Body Shots, Drunk Beatles, Fluff, Handcuffs, M/M, Pining Paul, Shower Sex, Smut, Why Did I Write This?, You can't outdrink Ringo and that's a fact, and a stunning best mate with questionable choices, sometimes life would be simple if Paul just didn't have a dick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-01 22:37:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15783522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unchained_Daisychain/pseuds/Unchained_Daisychain
Summary: Paul often expected his nights of heavy drinking to end in handcuffs, just…never like this.-“Let’s ‘ave a little bet, lads.” An enticing sort of wickedness underlay his tone, roughened its edges. His eyes scanned the group, lastly landing on Paul. Lennon hardly looked as pissed as Paul himself felt, but even sober, his schemes had a nasty habit of biting them all in the arse.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this wasn't supposed to happen. I got sucked into some youtube vids and watched the buzzfeed ones where people are handcuffed together for 24 hours, so I wanted to do it mclennon edition with a different backstory. not sure what I'm expecting from this fic reception wise, I just hope y'all like it even though it's a bit random. this is my tenth ever fanfiction, so I'm pumped for that, just didn't expect it to be such an unexpected one.
> 
> title is inspired by a tom petty song ("Even the Losers")
> 
> that's all there really is to know, so I hope you like reading about drunk beatles. happy reading, folks!

Bottle upon bottle of booze covered the table in the shared lounge of their suite. The Beatle-exclusive after-party following Epstein’s initial posh gathering. “Love Me Do” had steadily inched its way up the charts and now nestled comfortably at number seventeen. Thus far, it was the highest one of their singles had climbed, and even Brian had a celebratory bone large enough in his body to allow his boys the extended celebration within the privacy of their London suite.

Paul already had spent the better half of his evening racing down busy streets with the band’s latest hit blaring from his radio, accompanying his own vocals with elated shouts of, “That’s me! That’s me!” But now he kicked back with his three best mates and enough alcohol to satiate all of the sailors on the Mersey.

They were all plenty tipsy by now. John and Paul sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor, a booze barricade separating them from George, Ringo, and the more appropriate amount of space between them. Though earlier that day they were four identical monkeys sporting their pressed suits, each of them now varied in their states of undress.

Suit jackets folded limply along the sofa. George had stripped himself of everything above the trousers, even leaving his boots on. A polar opposite, Ringo sported a clothed top half and had knocked off trousers and shoes alike no sooner than the door to their suite had shut. The most tame of the group, Paul had possessed the energy only to rid himself of his socks and shoes. His tie was loosened a few inches and his rolled sleeves revealed the dark forest on his arms. One of those arms frequently came into contact with John’s waist, scarcely covered by the unbuttoned collared shirt splayed open across his chest. His tie draped like a curtain rope around his neck, stretches of skin on show in such a way it drained the moisture from Paul’s mouth.

Paul finished off his rum and coke, feeling warm all over. It radiated from every part of him that touched John. He instantly regretted sitting so close. When his empty glass hit the varnished wood, it appeared to strike an idea within John.

“Let’s ‘ave a little bet, lads.” An enticing sort of wickedness underlay his tone, roughened its edges. His eyes scanned the group, lastly landing on Paul. Lennon hardly looked as pissed as Paul himself felt, but even sober, his schemes had a nasty habit of biting them all in the arse.

“What d’you have in mind?” Ringo asked, lazily sipping at a beer.

John smiled in that lethal way of his.

“We split into teams—me and Paul, you and Geo. We drink until one team collectively spews. Losers get…,” he looked off to the side, searching the air, “get…umm….” Dumbly, he stared at Paul, beckoning his assistance with his eyes. Little help McCartney proved to be, distracted by the sight of whiskey-colored browns like a deprived alcoholic.

“Oh!” Luckily, George was clambering his way off the floor in an arduous struggle. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” he mumbled before stumbling off to the room he shared with Ringo.

Eyebrows cocked, they exchanged puzzled looks. Ringo sighed, shaking his head. “Fellas, he’s already three sheets to the wind, we ain’t got a chance of winning.”

John wrapped his arm around Paul’s shoulders with a beaming smile. “Macca can’t hold his drink for shit, but I think he’s got a better chance than Harrison.”

Paul turned to him, frowning but unable to suppress a drunken grin. “And who do you think it was always pulling you from The Cavern by the leather jacket?”

“Can’t remember cause I was too busy lookin’ after yer sorry arse blowing chunks in the bog, wasn’t I?” His thick eyebrows raised pointedly.

Paul rolled his eyes and nudged John’s side. Jabs peeved him off far less when he wore an armor of booze. Shameful it didn’t repel daft things like the blissful flutter in his stomach from John’s arm still slung around him, though.

“My point is, we’ve got this in the bag, son.” And it was that contagious Lennon confidence that always lured Paul into his foolhardy whims. Considering their music was on its way to taking mainstream Britain by storm, however, he couldn’t say all of John’s schemes were fruitless.

George reentered the room, his long teeth splitting his smile. “First team to collectively puke gets handcuffed together for twenty-four hours,” he declared, the shimmering metal ring of a pair of handcuffs dangling precariously from his finger.

“Why the _fuck_ do you ‘ave handcuffs, Harrison?” Paul questioned, brow creased tight.

“Did you have it off with a cop?” John laughed. The vibrations buzzed against Paul’s side, tickled his ribcage.

“What ‘appens in Hamburg stays in Hamburg, boys.” He smirked and, swinging the cuffs around his finger, joined them on the floor. “And, well,” he shrugged, “just never ‘appened to take these out of me bag.”

Ringo’s amused voice chimed in, “How is George the kinkiest lad in the room right now?”

John scoffed. “Now, no one said that, did they?”

Paul shifted, itching to steer the conversation in another, less suggestive, direction. “Look, if we’re gettin’ pissed, can we at least make the drinkin’ more interesting? Don’t think I’ll last when it starts becoming a chore.”

“Paulie’s got the right idea, lads.” John’s eyes shifted with that same kind of gleam Paul had seen at the proposal of a friendly bet. It was a gleam as beautiful as it was dangerous.

 

Five minutes later saw each pair with a bottle of tequila by their side and boyish giggles spilling from their lips. Paul was kneeling over John, lip trapped between his teeth as he stared at the clear puddle of tequila in and around his mate’s belly button. Below it rested a crisp horizontal line of salt, the occasional crystal knocked askew from John’s steady breathing.

Paul was well aware this was what the scene of a mistake would looked like painted across a canvas. All harsh brush strokes and bold colors. No clearer warning sign.

Still, here he was, on his knees before John’s body as though it were a shrine. _In some ways,_ the more inebriated corners of his mind supplied, _maybe it was._

Paul avoided John’s gaze. The curl of his shit-eating grin was ingrained to the side of Paul’s face, though, burning his cheek. He blinked rapidly, already feeling a bit nauseous with _himself,_ never mind the alcohol. Why the fuck was he doing this again?

Maybe the payoff of George and Ritchie being cuffed at the wrists for a day would be well worth the embarrassing hard-on he’d get from sipping drinks off the soft parts of John’s body.

Voices colliding with the dense smell of bad decisions in the air, John and George yelled, “Ready, steady, go!”

Paul swallowed a frightening bundle of nerves and ducked his head.

All or nothing.

His lips puckered around the small ring of John’s belly button, tongue dipping in daringly. Beside him, John shouted, excited by the touch, and gripped the scarce fabric of the carpet two-handedly. Paul was lost somewhere amidst the dangerous chasm of amused and aroused. Smiling around the faint sting in his throat, Paul set to the finale of licking the salt. His tongue glazed along John’s skin smoothly, and he batted away the thought urging him to have a taste a little farther south.

Last bloody time he’d agree to body shots with a shit-faced Lennon.

When he at last faced the man, he was lost to a fit of mad giggles. The sight sobered Paul fractionally. Maybe he was a bit in love, but with John’s almond eyes clenched tight and his genuine laugh stealing his own breath, who could blame him?

“Ahaha!—Oh, oh bloody hell, that’s _brilliant!”_ John enthused. Smile-crinkled eyes stared at the ceiling as his stomach spasmed with laughter. Paul stared, helpless and pathetic. “Alright, mine and Georgie’s turn.”

He righted himself into a sitting position, using the aid of Paul’s shoulder in his effort. With a peculiar sort of eagerness Paul preferred to ignore, John eased Paul to the floor by the hand at his shoulder and unbuttoned his shirt. Paul took a deep breath. Sparks scattered across his stomach at the accidental slide of John’s fingertips against his skin.

John was snickering above him as he unscrewed the cap of the tequila bottle. Paul gasped when the cool liquid splashed into his navel. He swallowed, his pulse in his throat, shifting his teeth. Because of a sloppy pour, rivulets trickled down the side of his waist and pooled at his trousers like rain leaking from a stagnant cloud.

John murmured an, “Oops,” and ran the ball of his finger along the spill before licking the stray drops into his mouth. “Turn yer head that way,” he commanded in a manner not to be trifled with.

Foolishly and without question, Paul craned his neck to face the couch. Pelting his skin like miniature hail, a line of salt, sprinkled with far less finesse than his own, suddenly spread its way across Paul’s neck.

“John, what—no!” Paul laughed, made to turn his head. John held it in place with three firm fingers against his jaw. When he cut his eyes, Paul caught nothing but John’s gorgeous, manic smile.

“Shuddup!” he snapped, chuckling through it all the same. “And quit yer bloody squirmin’!”

John didn’t reprimand him long for that, for once his left hand splayed flat against the floor between Paul’s open thighs and his right hand met the taut skin below his ribcage, the younger man went stiff as a board. He clenched his eyes shut and barely heard John’s next words over the buzzing in his ears.

“Alright, George?”

“Alright, John,” he called back, a laugh wrapped around his words.

As their mates had done for them, Paul and Ringo counted them off, albeit somewhat shakily on Paul’s part. “Ready, steady, go!”

Fingers crooking against Paul’s stomach, John dipped down and slurped the shot into his mouth. Paul bit his lip, but, fuck—when John flicked his tongue in and around his navel, firm, wet sweeps along his abdomen, he nearly drew his entire fist between his teeth to restrain a gasp. He hardly noticed when John shuffled closer to lick away his preplanned salt trail, until the man’s breath heated the pulsing sinews of Paul’s neck.

After dragging parted lips across the crystals, John didn’t stop there. He continued mouthing Paul’s fevered skin, even moving lower to the junction of his neck and shoulder. Faint traces of arousal slunk through Paul’s body at the wet nips and licks. But alcohol coursed strongest through his blood, teased his veins in cruel mimicry of the pressure at his neck.

And suddenly, the rhythmic slide of John’s mouth did nothing but tickle McCartney silly.

His body contorted, laughs billowing like smoke from a chimney. Lean legs folded, then flailed against the air as he breathlessly begged John to stop. Undeterred by the shoulder that cocked and squirmed beside his face, John sniggered and it casted a slew of vibrations along the skin between his teeth.

“If someone pisses on this floor, game’s over,” George warned, but the cackling duo paid no mind. Right now, it was just them, a warm mouth, and a dizzying number of fiendish fingers.

“The little lamb doth need more salt, methinks,” John teased, grabbing the shaker and showering another sprinkle onto Paul’s spit-slick neck. McCartney couldn’t resist a bout of giggles at John’s playful, slurred tone. His lovely and lively snorts painted the room in sloppy shades of amber. “Ooh, and it’s cooked so rare it may as well be back roamin’ the bloody fields.”

“Ge—gerroff, Johnny! Please!”

But that would be too easy, wouldn't it?

When John had a victim, he robbed them for all they were worth.

Tears edged Paul’s eyes. His stomach toppled and sloshed a sea of unruly alcohol within him. Stealthy waves of nausea overcame him. Finally, they knocked so fiercely against his throat that Paul knew he would be the first one done for the night.

With a surprising swell of strength, he manhandled John out of his way. Swaying strides led him to the bathroom and he fell to his knees in front of the toilet. A night’s worth of bending tore from his stomach in a matter of seconds.

Their chance of winning the bet was all in John’s hands now.

Paul returned from the loo groaning. He loathed puking—the strain it had on his throat, the acerbic aftertaste, all of it. But at least he felt a touch less like death. As he returned to his previous seat, leaning heavily and without care into John’s side for unabashed comfort, he noticed a certain guitarist’s absence.

“Where’s Geo?” he mumbled into the fabric covering John’s shoulder. It felt so soft against his cheek and John smelt so good. Spicy, masculine. Paul loved that smell. He closed his eyes and breathed it in, content to fall asleep there if he could.

“You set ‘im off with yer ghastly retching,” Ringo informed him. Paul reckoned they should forfeit already and take the loss, because it was no surprise Ritchie held his drink better than all of them. Unfortunately, their band leader was a stubborn prick.

“John’s fault,” he defended. “Bloody stupid mouth of his.” But Paul loved that mouth. Curled into a smirk, coloring clubs with songs, lashing him with articulate fuck off’s. No matter the shape or ammunition fired from it, Paul loved that mouth.

“I’ve ‘ad many a bird quiver beneath it, Macca,” John slurred into his hair. Words dripped from the locks and trickled like honey into his ear. “Suffice ta say you did, too, just not the same way, mind.”

The thought of himself squirming beneath John’s lips like some nameless bird heated Paul’s cheeks. He shook his head, consequently scattering a fantasy of John’s head between his thighs.

Fuck….

Either he was too drunk or not drunk enough.

Nothing good could come of spending twenty-four hours locked to John by the wrist. Christ, he couldn’t even last one minute next to the man and his endless suggestive comments without itching in his skin. Yet here he was, pitted against an unwavering Ringo and already kneeling before a metaphorical chopping block. Was it too late to switch teams?

“Someone go check on Georgie boy,” Ringo said around his umpteenth drink of the night. “Been gone a while, he has.”

“Why don’ you do it?” John countered stubbornly, arguing for argument’s sake. Regardless, he pulled to his feet, unsteady.

Paul huffed as the warmth of his body disappeared, a draft rushing to his side to replace it. With bleary eyes, he watched John stagger towards their mates’ room. Curses streamed from the older man’s mouth in vulgar ribbons. John clutched the door frame to steady himself, clearly more drunk than he thought now that he faced the feat of walking.

“John, love, just take the loss ‘fore ye poison yerself,” Paul pleaded. A bet wasn’t worth the health of his best mate.

“‘M…‘m fine, Paul.” His words toppled over his tongue and spilled onto the white wall, where he rested his head with closed eyes. A deep breath and he pulled away, facing them with a confidence he certainly couldn’t have felt. “‘Ere, pass us a…pass us a drink, Ritchie.”

With minimal physical effort, Ringo handed one over.

“Ringo!” Paul scolded, appalled he would enable John’s drinking.

The older man shrugged. “Only cos of the bet, Paul. Wouldn’t do it otherwise.” In a whispered, conspiratorial tone, he added, “Poor sod won’t be able to stomach it anyway.”

John popped the cap with determination. Then hesitated.

He eyed the drink like the liquid beast it was. It sloshed angrily in his shaking hand. His Adam’s apple bobbed in anticipation of the challenge that would be actually swallowing the beer.

Paul couldn’t keep quiet, couldn’t sit by and watch disaster unfold. “John, don—”

But just as their wise older friend had ensured would happen, John caught one whiff of the bitter booze and lost it. An artificial plant beside the television set suffered the brunt of John’s loss—both physical and competitive it was. The two men on the floor recoiled at the sounds of their mate chucking up just as Paul and George had done.

It was a drunken domino effect and Paul had been the clumsy finger to knock them all down.

Game over.

With a grave sigh, Paul hauled himself to his feet and came to John’s aid. He had taken to seeking refuge against the wall once more, hair a disheveled mess as it splayed like an auburn stain against the wallpaper. Gently, Paul placed a hand on John’s quivering back, slid it further to hold his waist.

“Let’s go, mate, we’re done for.” His best mate clinging to him like a wounded soldier, Paul maneuvered them towards their room. John’s head lulled close to Paul’s. Gusts of breath kissed his cheek, and Paul truthfully, surprisingly, wasn’t drunk enough for this Lennon caretaking. Made him feel soft, made him think daft thoughts like how John’s lips would taste against his own. Preferably sober.

“Get yer rest, you two,” Ringo advised, amused. He bent over and retrieved their punishment from the floor—a metal pair of handcuffs that jingled with the tinny pitch of defeat. “Ye’ve got a shiny new pair of friendship bracelets waitin’ for ya tomorrow.” Carrying with him his beer, but leaving behind his laughter, he exited the shared lounge.

“Fuck off, Starkey,” John hurled to a now closed door. To the man helping him to their room, he softly confessed, “‘M sorry, Macca. I tried.”

Paul squeezed his side, couldn’t resist a quiet laugh over John’s troubled tone. “Don’t sweat it, Johnny. Tomorrow won’t be so bad, yeah?” For six years they basically had lived in each other’s back pockets as it was.

Twenty-four hours attached by the wrists should be a breeze.

Paul dumped John into his bed and wrangled the covers from beneath his pissed bulk before folding them over his body instead. He turned to round the bed and head for his own when a hand caught his wrist.

“You alright, Paulie?” John stared up through mere slits of his eyes, caught on the precipice of sleep, but seemingly called back by some unresolved duty. “Feelin’ better?”

“Fine, love,” Paul whispered. Physically, he was the most sober he’d felt all night. The realization of losing did that to a person. But fear loomed over him like a shadow. Fortunately, shadows remained hidden in the dark, and Paul felt a sense of relief in knowing he could bed his worries for yet another night. “Sleep now,” he told both John and himself.

John nodded, gave Paul’s wrist a squeeze, then kissed his knuckles. Paul would have convinced himself he imagined it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. Still, he knew he was thinking too much into it. John was just a closeted softie. Paul had known that for years—also knew there was a special nook in John’s heart reserved specifically for him. That didn’t mean he wasn’t surprised all over again each time the man showed it.

“Happy first chart-topper, Paul,” John murmured as he rolled over, gripping the blankets below his chin with an air of childlike innocence.

Paul smiled but sighed, fatigued in more ways than he could count. “Happy first chart-topper, John.” With a tingling wrist and kiss-stained knuckles, he ambled away to his bed.

Paul was wrong. Paul was terribly, terribly wrong. Spending a full day with John right at his fingertips, literally breathing down his neck, was going to be a grueling battle he was largely unprepared for.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bc my mind is particularly prone to Roaming™, a wee (not wee) bit of smut has arrived early. stay tuned until the end if you're up for all that jazz.
> 
> thanks a ton for reading and dropping me all of those lovely, lovely comments! it's beyond encouraging. hope this chapter isn't a right bore since it's hella long. happy reading, folks!
> 
> (new title for the series is taken from the boys' song "Chains". also will be useful to know the tune to "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" for this chapter #justsaying)

Unfortunately, a dreadful hangover was not punitive enough.

His eyes pulsated in their sockets and his head felt as though it was simultaneously expanding and compressing. A graveyard had occupied his mouths some minutes before, and now its ghostly souls had wandered into his brain to enfold each thought within a foggy haze. Already an hour into the wake of his agonizing hangover, yet Paul still hadn’t even suffered the brunt of his day.

As he knotted his tie in front of the mirror, his eyes shifted over to a slumbering John reflected in the top left corner of the glass. Only his sleep-tousled head poked from the covers, skin softened by slumbering contentment. The sight thrusted Paul back to the yesteryears of Paris—staring, not without some degree of shame, as his lunatic of a best mate achieved some semblance of peace in their squalid Parisian hovel. Sharing beds and dreams and a city with more love than either of them knew what to do with.

But now, two years later, Paul knew where to spend his love. He knew—and it frightened him to his very core.

A knot of greater girth rushed to his throat and made the act of tightening his tie that more choking. He swallowed it and approached John’s bed.

“John.” The edge of the mattress dipped as he sat. His hand gripped John’s shoulder and shook him gingerly. “John, we’ve got to be at the studio soon.”

John groaned, shoved his face further into his pillow, petulant. At that moment, Paul exhausted all of his empathy on poor, saintly Mimi. John refused to grace the world with his genius before noon on a _good day,_ so how she managed to coax him out of bed all of his life was utterly lost on Paul.

Another shake to the shoulder. “Get up, you great bloody oaf.” Paul certainly went about it with far less grace.

“But I don’t wanna go to school, mummy, the headmaster beats me,” John whined into his pillow, his immaturity tangible.

Before Paul could respond, a rap only a drummer could make rhythmic sounded at the door and Ringo’s voice singsonged after it. “Oh, boys! Papa’s back from the slammer, and this time he’s brought pressies!”

“Oh, bloody Christ,” Paul sighed, dropping his head. Beside him, John was actually grinning into his pillow sham, imprinting upon it yet another design with the curl of his lips. How the eldest two of the group were most immature, Paul couldn’t fathom.

Ringo sauntered in, despite lack of permission, with an air of gaiety that nearly offended Paul. Maybe it was because booze filled his bottles as a baby, or maybe it was because even liquor couldn’t summon the depravity to pollute his cheer. No matter the reason, Ringo Starr was immune to the repercussions of drinking, and Paul lovingly despised him for it.

“Morning, Ritchie,” he greeted, nonetheless.

John grabbed his glasses from the night table and shifted up in bed, more wakeful with the intrusion. His arms crossed lazily behind his head, wrinkled shirt from the previous night revealing a smooth plane of chest. All at once their position on the bed felt a bit too intimate—John recumbent and open beneath a Paul who hovered too closely over the heat of his scarcely-clothed body.

“‘Lo, lads.” Ringo nodded. The blue in his eyes glinted with victory; the metal in his hands shimmered with menace. Paul couldn’t look at either of them. “George! Get in here so we can officiate the wedding!”

“If this fucking yelling doesn’t stop, I’m rigging yer kit with cherry bombs next set.” George shuffled in like he’d just peeled himself from sizzling concrete after playing roadkill all night. His hair was in shambles on his head and his brow wore a perpetual crease.

“Christ, Harrison, you look like shit.” John’s voice carried that sleep-infused scratch, and Paul focused on the jackhammer pound against his skull rather than the chill up his spine.

“Aye, I fell asleep huggin’ the toilet, and now it feels like a construction site in me head.” He scrubbed a hand across his face, rough enough to sand away the ache. “Let’s get on with it, then,” he sighed.

Ringo beamed at them as the cuffs scraped together and each strand hung open in anticipation. “Wrists please.”

Silently but mutually, they agreed the most logical and practical arrangement would be Paul’s right wrist locked to John’s left. Never before had Paul been so grateful they were mirror images.

“I now pronounce you husband and husband,” Ringo declared. The metal grinded and locked with a resolute click. “You may now kiss the McBride.”

Before Paul had time to bitch about being dubbed the bride, John grabbed his cheeks in a sudden fit of insanity. Paul’s right hand was drug up to his own face by John’s left, and his lips were seized in a bruising, closed-mouth kiss. It was firm and concise and did exactly what Paul believed John intended for it to do—stun the living shit out of him.

“We’ll consummate it later on, love, yeah?” John teased when he pulled away, sprinkling on the seduction he typically reserved for birds.

Paul’s heart knocked against his ribs like a caged animal. Eyes wide and eyebrows high, he stared at John, who merely collapsed against the bed with carefree laughter. Accustomed to Lennon’s spontaneity, George and Ringo chuckled along, and Paul realized, offhandedly, their reactions made John feel safe. No condemnation or peculiar side-eyes that would cast the man into a torrent of defensiveness. After all, even playfully kissing a mate treaded the fine line of incurring judgement.

Despite him being the victim, Paul’s scarlet cheeks and the abrupt rush of heat pistoning through his veins felt incriminating. Perhaps the harsh metal digging into his wrist now was a most appropriate punishment for his body’s reactions, only best suffered alone.

Blinking away a daze, Paul escaped the fetters of his thoughts just in time to hear John’s next words. “One problem, though, fellas,” he said.

“What?” George asked blankly.

“I still gotta change me shirt, and, well….” John lifted their combined wrists for emphasis, a shit-eating grin smearing across his lips far too easily for a Monday morning hangover.

 

That, Paul realized over breakfast, was just the first obstacle of the day. Off to a shabby start, to say the least. They quickly concluded changing shirts would be allowed two handcuff removals all day, so they had to plan wisely.

However, in all of their hasty preparations, there was one thing they failed to consider: Brian’s reaction.

The suite’s dining table saw the four bandmates and a dutiful Mal gathered around it. Everyone delved into a substantial breakfast, courtesy of the hotel, save for John, who found a cigarette to be sustaining enough no matter how many times Paul had tried to persuade him to eat. With his stamina to beg flagging, Paul decided just to enjoy his own meal as best as he could with one hand.

Eventually, their manager entered the suite, deadening the casual conversation with his no-nonsense strides. Orders and demands soon occupied every articulate breath. He was in the middle of asking Mal to call their car around front when his eyes met John and Paul’s conjoined wrists, and his words melded into a different question entirely.

“Boys, why on earth are you two handcuffed together?” His voice ventured into that sacred octave only heard when he truly was puzzled. In the face of all he’d dealt with this morning, Paul had to suppress a laugh at his bafflement. The lot of them exchanged smiles like secret handshakes.

“Lost a bet, they did,” George informed around a mouthful of something Paul wasn’t even sure was actually on the table.

“Well, uncuff yourselves. We have serious work to do and don’t need two band members parading around like criminals.”

Ringo shrugged, clearly nonplussed in the face of Epstein’s authority. “No can do, Eppy. The rules are stringent,” he said, emphasizing the ‘t’.

“A bet’s a bet and we needn’t forget,” John murmured, words drifting as a smoke of their own around his cigarette. The fork between Paul’s teeth split the smile born from his friend’s animated tone.

“How exactly do you two plan to play today?” He punctuated the question with crossed arms, embodying a headmaster demeanor.

John and Paul exchanged a look. For the first time in years, music hadn’t been their first priority, and presently their second roadblock of the day erected itself before their very eyes. “Well…,” Paul began, then hesitated, uncertain. “There’s piano and…and vocals.”

John came to his aid, summoning that biting tone he too often hid behind. “Look, we’ll figure it out, alright? S’just one day lost anyway, and God knows you work us like bloody slaves as is.”

Paul had to give John credit—lucrative or not, he always weathered out his crazed schemes until the bitter or blessed end.

Brian sighed, a heaved breath revealing the extent of his precarious composure. “Please just get in the car.” A lock of meticulously-styled hair drooped in a disappointment all its own. His hand swam through his hair to settle it back into place. “And if you would, look as inconspicuous as you can, yes?”

They abandoned their dishes and shuffled from the room like naughty schoolboys. Skin and metal alike brushed as they breezed past their manager with minimal eye contact. Paul found it difficult being bound to another person and unable to drift ahead at his own pace.

George’s whisper, coated in amusement, trailed behind his back. “Lads, Brian’s neck is doing that funny thing again where the veins pop out.”

Paul snickered and tried not to fall too far behind John’s quick step.

* * *

Voices, unlocked and untroubled, climbed one another in the spacious studio. The frequent chord or drumbeat trudged along after them in a merry chase. They were nearly thirty minutes into a session that resembled a packed playground more than any respectable work.

For lack of time better spent, John and Paul toyed with their vocal ranges, the knowledge of recording tape wasted falling short on their consciences. This part was easy, though, Paul realized. As backwards as it sounded, singing love songs within a vicinity far closer than any two mates should be in felt nothing but familiar. And in times of discomfort, Paul _craved_ familiarity.

Familiarity sounded a bit like John spouting nonsense into a mic. It felt like the lightning-quick prods he jabbed into the vulnerable spots of Paul’s body. It looked like Buddy Holly glasses that magnified his chestnut eyes and two front teeth that defied the arrow-straight order of the rest of them. Simply put, familiarity was an easy-to-reach heaven.

John stood beside him, the back of his hand constantly brushing Paul’s own as he giggled, high-pitched, at the occasional horrid sounds they emitted together. Perhaps John’s thinking had corrupted him, but Paul figured one day of wanking about in the studio wouldn’t plateau their careers. Sure, they were bound by contract, but he and John had bashed out new hits in a matter of half an hour more times than he could count. This was the best those suit types would be getting out of them today.

“George is fucking up his chords,” Paul sung into the mic during a lapse in recording.

“At least I’ve got chords to fuck up!” George retorted from across the studio. A discordant strum punched through the air and struck Paul’s face as a smug _FUCK YOU!_

“Oi!” John snapped back at George, easing further and further into that playful spirit Paul loved so much. “We fire the likes of your kind around here!”

“Oh yeah?!”

“Yeah!”

George hesitated. Then, “Oh…well, alright then.”

Suddenly, George Martin’s voice rained upon them from the sound room up top. “Boys, can we please get on with it? Nothing we’ve done so far is actually usable.”

Paul knew there was practically nothing to be done without a bassist and rhythm guitarist, but for all his might, Martin was trying to conjure _something_ from them. Trust Lennon to foil that entirely.

“Four score and seven beers ago, I didn’t give a bloody fuck,” he shouted back, nearly nonsensical. His giddy, fuck-all attitude cascaded from him in waves. Being so close, it was only natural Paul absorbed a sizeable sum of it. “And you know what?”

“What’s that, Johnny?” Paul giggled, eyebrow lifted in dramatic intrigue.

“I still don’t!” To punctuate his declaration, George’s guitar belted a short riff.

“Okay, okay,” Paul relented, stray chuckles still gripping him, “let’s go, let’s go.”

The studio speakers crackled to life once again. “‘You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me’, take one.”

The irony immediately took hold of Paul as much as the song’s title would suggest. John laughed boisterously and his eyes sparked like a comet.

“Aw, c’mon, George, really?” Ringo groaned from behind his kit, freshly returned from the loo. “You’re just asking for trouble with that one, you know.”

“Alright, lads! A one-uh, a two-uh, a three-uh, a four-uh….”

Right on cue with his own daft countdown, John began singing, “I don't like Paul, but I'm cuffed to Paul,” and the subject of his lament immediately dissolved into laughter. John brought their joined wrists to the microphone and steadily rattled the chains to mimic Ringo’s beat. “Seems that I'm always up to _stuff_ with Paul. Oh, oh, oh, my wrist hurts badly. It drives me madly, he's really got a hold on me.”

As he would with any number, Paul supplied his backing vocals to the lyrics. Drawing the charade a step further, he spun John beneath their chained wrists and marvelled at how imprisonment could feel so close to freedom. His heart clenched at the thought. But then the moment was reeling away with him and all he could manage was to grasp it, steadfast, since he sure as hell had no intentions of letting go.

Another tape wasted, but another moment cherished.

 

After a tea break, the two tapped out some notes on the piano, the only merciful instrument given their predicament. The bench afforded ample room, but their hips pressed firmly, regardless. Every time his hand grazed John’s, it required more focus than Paul cared to admit not to cock up the chords.

The air between them was suffocating, and Paul nearly felt masochistic for enjoying it. He explained it away as his inevitable descent into madness. Sharing a confined space with Lennon was compromising to any sane man’s psyche, not to mention that of a bloke who was already wrapped around his finger.

Just when he thought the tension couldn’t compress his trachea anymore, John’s fingers folded over his own, and Paul’s breath stuttered in his chest. “Macca?” The man passed over the nickname, soft.

“Hm?” Paul replied, not trusting his voice—feeling too breathless to even possess one.

Yet to respond, John slid from the bench, dragging Paul’s arm along, though his body stayed behind in its confusion. “Be a lad and come ‘ave a piss with me.” He smiled, boyish and cheeky.

Paul shook his head and, a bit flustered, trudged along after him.

The whole situation was awkward to say the least. As John emptied his bladder with no real unease disrupting his features, Paul was forced to stand beside him like some perverted voyeur. Disquietude consumed him in ravenous clusters. He ignored the steady stream against the porcelain, stilled a gaze that threatened to wander to where John was holding himself.

Throwing himself a lifeline, Paul blurted the first ready thought coasting through his mind. “My wrist is bloody killing me.”

John’s eyes instantly drew to it, hanging between their bodies. “Jesus, Paul, why is yours so red?” Paul watched his eyes widen as they intangibly caressed the red ring spreading around his wrist like a second handcuff.

The man in question shrugged. The burn had creeped up on him over the hours, and the fact it garnered concern from John’s tone told Paul perhaps it was nothing to think light of. “Guess Ringo locked it too tight. Doesn’t help walking beside you and yer giant fucking strides either, though,” he jested with a disarming smile.

All day, any time John darted away to fetch some tea or handle recording business, Paul was dragged along like a ragdoll. He muzzled his complaints, of course, because it wasn’t every day they suddenly had to pump the breaks for the hapless soul attached to their wrist. Besides, his own rabbit-paced movements were most likely none too forgiving on John, as well.

Still, the news clearly burdened John more than it should have. “Well, fucking hell, mate, just ask me to slow down, yeah?” His intent gaze met Paul’s, and McCartney felt properly chastised for his courteous silence.

But racing ahead of people—beating his head against the sky until his dreams, disguised as stars, shook loose—was just John’s MO in life, and Paul had never questioned it before, so why now? Asking him to slow down was no different than asking a bird to abandon flight.

The sound of the sink faucet creaking off eased Paul from his musings. “Let’s have a look, then,” John said, wiping the water clinging to his skin onto his trousers.

A cold, damp hand reached for Paul’s wrist, cradling it as if it were broken and not merely irritated. With what little leeway it gave, the metal was slid minutely higher up his wrist, and John’s fingers soon replaced it, skating along the scratches.

“‘S fine, I can bear it,” Paul assured him, voice soft.

They were secluded within the studio bathroom and the only coherent thought his mind supplied was John’s earlier kiss, though brief and harsh it had been. A playful lark for John had been a pivotal, dangerous occurrence for Paul. And now—now he was studying Paul’s wrist, trademark intimidation softened by unguarded tenderness, and his bones shook in their resistance not to drag John into a second kiss by a fistful of auburn hair.

But then John was speaking again, and some sense of normalcy placated the frenzied urge. “You just said it was bloody killing you.” Head bowed over Paul’s wrist, he glanced up through his eyelashes, smirked at Paul.

“Well…,” Paul offered, then shrugged, wanting neither to trivialize his pain nor admit to exaggerating it. Truthfully, it throbbed in dull aches when the strand rubbed it or knocked against his knobby wrist bone. But John’s touch had this marvelous way of numbing the pain.

Suddenly, the touch abandoned his wrist and ghosted over his palm, before threading between Paul’s fingers. Paul swallowed a lump that had stealthily crept up his throat and stared at their hands locking them together even more intimately than they were already.

“That should fix that, then, yeah?” John whispered to him, voice as tender as his grip.

Beating fervently, Paul’s heart threatened to tear straight through his chest. When he willed his eyes back to John’s, he waited for the daft punchline, the familiar Lennon jocularity to this cruel joke.

What he received instead was, “C’mon, then,” and a gentle tug away from the sink.

As they exited the bathroom, Paul took deep breaths like the fundamentals of respiration were a forgotten concept. They received curious glances, but no interrogations, and Paul couldn’t decide if he was appreciative of it or fearful. Did silence foretell acceptance to this complex John-and-Paul business? Where were the queer jabs to poke holes in their masculinity—to send Paul spiralling further into his crisis?

They were stuck, pasted like glue, on the tongues around them. And so John’s hand remained, light as a feather, between the quivering slits of Paul’s fingers.

* * *

By the time they returned to the suite, Paul ached for his guitar. The need often turned physical during trying times, neglected strings weeping out for him. Fortunately, after some time in the main suite with his mates and road crew, Paul was able to steal away to his own room. Not without his Lennon shadow, of course.

They hunkered onto one of the beds, John sacrificing his left hand so Paul could strum away on his guitar at leisure. Paul tried, in vain, to ignore how the selfless gesture made his stomach loop in daft little circles. He also batted away the feeling of John, body contorted nearly inhumanly next to him, with the sole of his foot nestled against the sensitive side of Paul’s ankle.

To bide his own time, John scribbled in the notebook cradled in his lap. In familiar penmanship, the lyric love dotted the page, far too often for Paul’s liking considering their inescapable propinquity. It felt impeccably close to mockery, though John couldn’t have known he was doing it. Meaningless words to faceless birds was their commonplace.

Lest his thoughts seize him wholly, Paul focused on his own ditty—a quick little number fantasizing of arms wrapping tight and unyielding around him. As his fingers maintained the rhythm they had created, his mind lobbied lyrics that he murmured aloud to himself.

_“Making love to only yo—”_

The graphite tip of John’s pencil snapped and he pitched it across the room in an unexpected fit of anger that quieted Paul altogether.

“Okay, I can’t fuckin’ take this anymore,” he was fuming, hauling himself from the bed and leaving Paul with no choice but to follow. “Where’s George? I want the key.”

“What?” Paul asked, a deep frown etching across his brow. Back flexed with tension, John padded about the room, his feet uncertain of where they wanted to lead him. All at once Paul felt like he had started a book halfway through and struggled to find meaning between the spacing of words. “What’s wrong?” he tried again.

Shaking his head and threading a hand through hair that also somehow managed to look stressed, John said, “I can’t even be around Cyn this much, let alone…,” and left Paul astray, thrashing, amidst his unfinished thought.

But McCartney pressed, tasting something akin to an affront in everything John refused to say. “Let alone what?”

The other man sighed. His eyes fell to the carpet as though the fight had been drained from them. “Nothing.”

The air thickened with a miasma of confrontation, and it infuriated Paul that he hadn’t smelt it until it was right under his nose. For his part, Paul assumed their day suffered as a mobile ball and chain had been going relatively well, all things considered. Besides, John was the one who had whispered heated nonsense into his ear during recording, had gripped his hand with unsettling tenderness any time they were forced to move more than a few feet, and had crowded into his side during a relaxed chat on the sofa. None of that was Paul’s doing—despite him being the one with a face already eating the dirt because of how quickly he’d tumbled head over heels for the man—and God if—

“Look, if being around me is pissing you off that much, just get the bloody key, then,” Paul offered bitterly, pretty face twisted in frustration. Then he stormed off (daft and difficult, yes) to retrieve the damn thing himself.

“Paul—”

“They can’t force you to keep doing something you obviously don’t wanna do.”

Adamant, John jerked him back around using the shared chain of the handcuff. Before Paul even had a chance to stumble, he was steadied by a strong hold to the crest of his shoulder. Then John was backpedaling quicker than Paul knew him capable of doing.

“It’s not you, you know that.” His eyes begged for Paul’s understanding. In the face of naked vulnerability, Paul couldn’t help but soften, muscles palpably loosening with the effort. “It’s just…we’ve never been this close before, have we? Right up under each other’s bloody noses?”

As John talked himself down, explained a dilemma Paul understood all too well, the pent-up frustration ebbed from him like a tide. Giving a nod of recognition and his silence, Paul waited.

“I’m just…knackered and probably still a bit fucking drunk—and I feel like all I’ve smelled all day is _you,_ and it’s…dizzying as all hell, you know?” He laughed, somewhat mirthlessly and venturing closer to breathless.

Paul’s stomach coiled, mind fuzzed off into static only to piece back together in one desperate thought of: _What is he implying?_

Banking on levity, he retorted, “Could’ve just told me to ‘ave a wash.” Paul smiled at him, stunned by the effort it took.

John’s shoulders lifted and fell lazily. Quietly, he said, “Didn’t say it was a bad thing, did I?”

And that was what Paul feared—that his lust-driven musings weren’t unfounded at all. His friend always had to spout this stupid, unwittingly meaningful shit off the cuff, while Paul absorbed and absorbed like a sponge about to burst with all of this insatiable _want_ for the man.

He bounced, once, on his heels, but it did nothing to topple a response onto his tongue. Suspended in his own silence, he made for the door and only then broke it when he hollered for George to retrieve the coveted key. As he requested another agreed upon shirt removal in preparation for a shower, John’s face fell.

“Paul, I didn’t mean—I wasn’t saying—”

With a genuine chuckle, Paul cut him off. “Calm down, mate, I was gonna have one anyway.” He shot John a wink and watched the color of his eyes shift dazzlingly as he received it.

John’s throat cleared and he straightened. One stunning bush of an eyebrow raised questioningly. “And what am I supposed to do while you’re in there?”

“Stand on the other side of the curtain and don’t bother me.”

 

Five minutes. Five fucking minutes in, clothes a pile on the floor and body in a pleasant lather, before John was up to his old dastardly ways.

The first time the curtain shuffled, Paul wrote it off as John readjusting his awkward position that required him to blindly poke one arm into the shower with Paul. No more than half a minute later, however, it rustled against his body again, and the sudsed up lad caught a glimpse of his mate’s eyes on him.

He frowned.

“John, what’re you doing?” came his hesitant call, movements halting as he strained his ears over the rush of water.

“Come again, love?” John replied, in a voice that indicated, henceforth, he was about to take absolutely _nothing_ seriously. “The rain in here is just _torrential_ tonight.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “Stop bloody moving the curtain, you dick.”

At least the previous wound-tight tension from earlier had wafted away and had since been consumed by the steam from the water, Paul conceded. They were back to their tenderly lobbed jabs, and it made breathing drastically simpler.

A crisp slap sent the nylon flapping, for good measure no doubt. “I’ll stop moving the curtain when you start saving some water for the rest of bloody Britain, okay, princess?”

“Yer insufferable,” Paul mumbled to himself.

“And yer just so cute when yer angry,” he said in an egregious falsetto. “Like a pissed off bunny, you are.”

He didn’t miss John sneak a second glance into the shower, a devilish smirk curling his lips. “Remember that part about not bothering me? Yeah, I actually meant that.”

Paul figured John must’ve gotten the hint after that, because the shower curtain remained as the partition it was intended to be. It proved to be unmatched to the low rumble of his voice, however, which snaked between the thin slits and had Paul next to shivering with its next surprising suggestion.

“We could just shower together, you know. Conserve on water and time an’ all that.”

No note of mockery. A deathly serious proposal.

A steady pound of water hammered against Paul’s back as he stood frozen in place and thought. A traitorous assessment of the situation concluded they were already nearly at that point already. In fact, Paul standing right daft beneath the showerhead with a fully clothed John just behind the curtain was perhaps even more awkward than hopping in naked together. One of them was making this a bigger deal than it needed to be, and Paul had a sneaking suspicion it was himself.

Only when John suddenly yelped, “Jesus, mate, tryin’ to tug me in there with you?” did Paul realize he hadn’t even responded to the man’s first remark. And he refused to consider what his answer to the most recent one might be.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, “just…trying to get me back.” He huffed as he twisted the arm bound to John’s in an effort to reach the neglected stretches of his back. For once, his physical limitations were a welcome distraction.

Soft, John offered, “Need some help?”

“No, I’ve almost—”

“Fuck it,” and to Paul’s abject horror, John was suddenly crowding into the shower, fully clothed but feet bare, whilst instructing, “Turn around, then.”

“What the hell—are you mad?!” His eyes bugged and body shifted to afford room.

“Probably, yeah, but you’d be lying to yourself if you said you didn’t love it.” With that, John wrenched the dripping cloth from Paul’s grip and, fixing him with an unwavering gaze, reached around to scrub it across his back.

Paul swallowed, mouth dry despite all the moisture slinking across his body. Blood roared through his ears, and between that and the gush of the water, it was deafening. Sure and steady, the hand on his back trailed lower, traversing the canyon-like small of his back. When John diverted course just before reaching his arse, Paul sighed a breath he unknowingly held and waited for the moment his vertebrae would split entirely beneath the man’s touch.

“There,” John whispered, hand coming to a stop at Paul’s shoulder. Eyes alight with a foreign fire slowly stalked down Paul’s face until they came to rest and burn on his lips.

In blessed mimicry, his own eyes lowered to John’s lips, thin and parted. They leaned in at the same time and it tasted like stupid bets turning into the most wonderful fucking payoffs imaginable.

John had kissed Paul earlier that day, at the start of all of this chaos, with a biting sort of chasteness. But now, adrift in the tailend hours of their punishment, he mouthed at his slickened lips with a tenderness he couldn’t write off as joking. In part for a toke of air amidst the shower’s downpour and in part for a more fulfilling taste of John’s mouth, Paul parted his lips. The older man, playing off of Paul’s cues as he would in song, snuck his tongue into his gasping mouth.

One hand cupping his cheek, he backed Paul out of the shower’s stream and forced himself into it instead. Paul gasped loudly, startled, when the chilled tiles wracked his body with shivers. It was a delicious dichotomy, being this hot and cold all over.

He gripped John’s tie, not an article of clothing left unsoaked, and jerked him forward to reinstate the kiss. With slow-churning thoughts, Paul revelled in the fact hesitation and uncertainty were nonexistent between them. Where he expected tangled limbs and knocking teeth (and admittedly, he wasn’t the precise picture of rock steady), he instead met a tongue eagerly gliding alongside his own and teeth nipping at his bottom lip as though it was sustenance.

As John’s mouth ghosted lower along his wet skin, licking at jaw and neck, Paul peeled opened his eyes. He half anticipated to be in a squalid little single bed with a hard-on, aching from this wet dream; but this was impossibly real and he was naked and half writhing against John’s clothed (fucking _why_ clothed?) body.

“Christ, John,” he rasped. Making the executive decision to have a drenched John in the same state as himself, Paul guided the man back by his shoulders and worked at his belt buckle.

“Oh,” John remarked, as though surprised, looking down at himself. “Okay, yeah, that’s good…that’s fun.”

Paul smiled, heart fluttering, head humming. “Suit’s fucking ruined, though.” The leather belt was whipped from its loops and discarded over the curtain rod.

John shimmied out of his trousers and kicked them aside before working at his tie with one hand. At Paul’s words, he shrugged. “Looks better on the floor anyway.”

Paul stared at John’s chest, made visible from the translucency of his soaked white shirt, and nearly begged to differ. It clung to his skin, pressed flat against a stomach Paul once had lapped tequila from. Then John was unbuttoning the shirt entirely, revealing his collarbone and nipples and slipping it from his shoulders, and Paul had to refrain from ducking his head to bite at every piece of skin exposed.

“Erm….” John hesitated and laughed, a breathy syllable of a thing, once he got to the right sleeve trapped around his wrist by its cuff.

Abandoning care and reason, Paul grappled with the material between two strong hands until it ripped dead at the seams. He slid it from John’s wrist and chucked it onto the impressive pile at the opposite end of the shower floor. “Better?”

“Fucking hell, you’re perfect,” John groaned and seized Paul’s mouth again, which quirked on a prideful smile around their kiss.

Once they shoved back against the wall, a most welcome support now, they were both hard and throbbing. John’s body was flushed and heated beneath his nomadic hands, and Paul traced the color all the way down to John’s sternum, rising and falling with needy breaths. Rolling undulations of hips had Paul’s head lolling back against the wall, watching John watching him through equally hooded eyes.

Girthy droplets clung to everything—eyelashes, hair, skin—too starved for contact to depart. Empathizing with such desperation, Paul twisted a hand through John’s damp hair as his head lowered to Paul’s neck and fevered his skin further with teeth and lips. Wrung through the tight squeeze of his fingers, John’s hair glistened like melted gold, and he gripped even tighter, until he convinced himself rivers of it were cascading down the drain.

“God,” Paul whispered, not sure if he was calling on Him or blaspheming Him, as he craned his neck for John’s kisses. Something certainly felt divine during this heated exchange, but Paul couldn’t precisely pinpoint what. When John moaned—stacotto and heavenly in his ear—from a particularly potent thrust, though, he started to have a notion as to what it may be.

Hauling Paul’s thigh over the jut of his hip, John groaned and quickened his thrusts. One hand bruised the side of Paul’s waist, fingerprints stamped onto the skin with erotic force. With it being John’s left hand, Paul’s right had no choice but to follow and fold atop it, feeling the shifting bones and smooth skin. Between their wet bodies, their cocks slid easily against one another. Paul was close and aching and virtually ready to melt out of his own skin from the combined heat of the shower’s spray and John’s breath.

“You’ve driven me barmy all day,” the older man huffed against his ear. Paul moaned, nodding along, because yes, yes, _yes,_ he empathized _completely._ “Humming your naff little songs about fucking right in my ear, on the same goddamn bed. Were you trying to get a rise out of me, love, or just bloody kill me?” He sucked Paul’s earlobe between his teeth and tugged, and Paul’s cock twitched fervently.

“I didn’t—I didn’t know you felt the same,” he admitted, voice dry and cracked like worn leather from his rapid breaths. Despite John’s revelation slowing most operations within his body, he kept his hips rocking in time.

He pulled away and fixed Paul with a look juxtaposing the fire in their bellies and passionate grips from their hands. A look so excruciatingly soft it punched Paul’s lungs empty. “Long time, Macca. Long fucking time,” John whispered, and, at long last, wrapped his cuffed hand around both of their throbbing pricks and stroked.

Paul dissolved into an inarticulate mess after that. His hips drew to the touch of their own volition, and his hand clutched John’s shoulder with the want to bruise. It took a matter of one glorious minute with John’s hand working him at a frenzied pace, before he came with an irrepressible moan. His brain fuzzed pleasantly, and only when it regained coherency did he realize John too was coming against their stomachs, cursing as he used Paul’s lax body for additional friction against his cock.

At feeling John’s faint jerks and twitches against his chest and having heard his thready whimpers, Paul was as good as done for. So he crumpled, entangled with John, to the grimy shower floor.

His chest heaved with each breath. Lone water droplets found their way into his open mouth. After a spell, he turned his head to look at John, who was recuperating at his own pace, hair in sinfully messy tufts and eyes smoldering in the aftermath.

When his almond eyes cracked open, Paul smiled and teased, “I wish all of your shitty ideas ended like that.”

John laughed, pulled him in by his dripping locks, and kissed him until the smiles faded from their lips.

* * *

The next morning was, in many ways, more pleasant than the one before. An ironic fact, that was, considering Paul already felt more cricks in his body than he could count before he even opened his eyes.

After their steamy shower last night, they had slipped into their skivvies and partook in a bit of room remodeling before bed. That is, in order to sleep in their handcuffed condition, they were forced to push both of their single beds together to rig up one large one. The next challenge had been to actually find a comfortable position for sleeping in the makeshift thing. At the beginning of the night, they had settled on facing each other, hands tucked beneath their chins and eyes locked on each other as they talked for a good extra hour or so. Sometime in the middle of the night, however, they had grown restless, and Paul had resulted to laying his head on John’s chest, with John’s cuffed hand curling around his shoulder.

Presently, he woke up in the same position.

He rubbed a sleep-soft cheek against John’s chest and dropped a kiss there. The older man sighed, Paul’s head rising and falling with it, and looked down at him. John was fortunate enough to claim Paul’s first smile of the day at that moment, then he leaned down and kissed it right from his lips.

Paul stroked John’s cheek with the side of his finger and, when they parted, whispered, “Good morning.”

“It is, innit?” John smiled, looking more boyish than Paul had ever seen. His hair was mussed across his head—whether from sex or sleep or both, Paul didn’t know—and his eyes ensnared a whisper of something Paul, foolishly or not, categorized as love.

He swallowed a stealthy lump in his throat and said, “Today’s the last day of prison.” But with all of these new revelations and feelings smoldering at the wick’s end of their punishment, Paul wasn’t quite sure whether that fact saddened or relieved him.

John stroked his arm, perhaps sensing his distress. “Yeah, I know.” He nodded, lips tight. “I’m glad it was with you, though.”

“Me too.” Paul couldn’t ward away his smile even if wanted to, and he tucked his face further into John’s chest, lest the man see the visual impact of his words sketched across Paul’s face. “We make a good team, yeah?”

“The best,” John agreed, soft.

And Paul was beyond grateful they were dismissing the fact they had lost the bet entirely.

Interrupting their tranquil morning was the sound of the doorknob turning. Only untangling themselves to an appropriate distance, the two sat up in bed. Paul drove the heel of his palm into his right eye, rubbing the sleep from it, and squinted at a yawning George trudging through their doorway.

“How are the two losers holding up?” he asked with a smirk.

“I don’t feel like a loser,” John answered, with a conviction only Paul could understand. Cementing that truth, he turned to the said man and nudged his hand. “Do you feel like a loser, Paul?”

Paul smiled at him as his mind went careering away with thoughts of John’s laugh sneaking into the microphone between the lyrics of a song, and John’s fingers slotted between Paul’s when his wrist had rubbed too raw, and John’s kiss meeting his own for the first time, and John’s body shivering against him as he drifted down from a soaring orgasm, and John’s eyes fluttering in his sleep the same way they did all those years ago when Paul had first fallen in love with him.

And no, Paul didn’t feel like a loser in the slightest; Paul felt like the luckiest bastard in the world.

“Not at all, John.”

George frowned at them, and their intense gaze snapped as he ventured closer to the bed. “Did we have those things on too tight or something?” he questioned, the forest of his eyebrows closing in tight. “Cutting off blood circulation?”

“Yeah, you did, actually,” John barked, back into his trademark acidity with seamless transition. “So fucking take ‘em off, you nit.”

Chuckling, George presented the key at the same time the lads presented their wrists. As soon as his cuff was removed, Paul rubbed the blooming red skin around his wrist; similarly, John rotated his own, inducing pops and cracks.

“Well, I’ll leave you two to it, then,” George said, heading for the door. “Gonna get a few more hours kip if that chainsaw in Ringo’s nose has died by now.”

Just before he reached the door, however, John called after him, “Oi, Harrison! Let us see those cuffs again?”

George tossed them over, seemingly hesitant, and John caught and cradled them in his lap. He nodded, a perused look on his face, as he hummed consideringly.

After an uncertain tick of time, George voiced a concern Paul himself had, “Erm…are you gonna give ‘im back?”

“What’s that?” John asked, facing George as though he only just noticed his existence. His eyebrows were raised, and his tone was comically casual. Paul bit the side of his cheek as he pondered where John might be going with this. Then, “Oh no, that won’t be necessary.”

Paul nearly snorted at the shrill octave to which George’s voice ascended. “Fuck that—”

“Alright, that’ll be all, now,” John interrupted, lumbering from the bed to push a bemused Harrison through their bedroom door. “Thanks for stopping by, ta-ta and all that.” The door slammed and the lock clicked. Paul heard what he thought to be a mumbled gripe of, “‘Kinkiest lad in the room’, my arse.”

Smiling, he bit his bottom lip and watched John turn around, eyebrows waggling mischievously.

“So, Macca,” he said, voice low and seductive as he approached Paul with the handcuffs swinging around his finger. He straddled Paul’s lap, thick thighs bracketing his slimmer ones, and placed his hands on his shoulders. Heated words sailed the small gap between them and docked at Paul’s lips. “You reckon two creative lads such as ourselves could find some way to use these again?”

Paul eased his hands up John’s thighs and stilled them over the curve of his arse. “I think we can come up with something, love,” he assured with a naughty grin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> !!!SUPER OFFICIAL KINK POLL!!!  
>  For those planning to read the sequel, I’m interested to hear who y’all wanna see subjected to handcuffs again. I’ve tossed around some ideas but haven’t come to a definitive decision as to who’ll wear them. I'd appreciate the feedback bc it'd help me out a ton with planning, and whoever receives the most requests gets cuffed. Bonus points (redeemable for nothing) for arguing your choice! 
> 
> thanks for reading!!
> 
>  
> 
> [***Shameless Self-promotion***](http://www.unchaineddaisychain.tumblr.com)

**Author's Note:**

> here's hoping you wanna see more. I'd like to hear your thoughts on it. I'm thinking of doing a one shot sequel after the next chapter that basically will consist of smut and handcuffs. also let me know if you'd be interested to read that bc I feel like I don't write enough smut and practice makes perfect, after all. 
> 
> thanks for reading!


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